Terra Foundation Strategic Initiatives are designed to support emerging needs in the field. Through this program, the foundation can support evolving ideas and programs while deepening relationships and generating combined impact.

Images

Person holds book open, with an image on recto and text on verso.

ICAA staff survey rare materials related to Latinx art at the Hirsch Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2024. Photo: Junior Fernandez, MFAH

Program Overview

Support is offered for immediate needs as well as for sustained, multi-year investments that may fall outside our annual grantmaking cycles. The grants can provide capacity support over time, as well as support projects that require flexibility in implementation time and space due to the need for testing and refinement.

We seek projects that:

  • play an integral part in a thriving field that is not restricted to exhibitions, collections, and convenings
  • help organizations navigate through critical moments via accelerated investment
  • foster conversations on the role American art and artists play in addressing shared concerns in our global world

Proposals by Invitation

This initiative program is invitation-only and adaptive by design. Our core application grant programs support many partners in the field, and we also recognize the need to embrace the ideas and creativity of the American art ecosystem in more nimble ways.

Supported Strategic Initiatives

Words from Grantees

WINIKO: Reunions challenges the idea that institutionally collected objects no longer have familial ties to cultural communities. Our goal is to identify a core practice for working with the tribal nations and their citizens that can be modeled and shared.

heather ahtoneDirector of Cultural Affairs, First Americans Museum

The project allows us to tell the full story of the Driskell Center’s history; its secondary aim is to inventory and make accessible an incoming gift of papers from the collection of Terrie S. Rouse-Rosario. Both projects allow the Center to continue serving as an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and the wider community, ensuring that the narrative of Black art is documented and celebrated for generations to come.

Jordana SaggeseDirector, Driskell C. Center for the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora

Giverny Convenings

Giverny Convenings

Giverny Convenings

We support projects that may benefit from convening groups at the foundation’s space in Giverny, France, as another initiative program.

Group of people seated on a blanket on the grass.

Repose as Resistance, Giverny, June 28–July 1, 2023. Mawena Yehouessi leads a session on research, critical texts in her research.

Recent Strategic Initiative Grants

Grant Opportunities

Two people looking at a painting on a well, with a sculpture to their left.

The Stories We Carry, collection reinstallation, Seattle Museum of Art, copyright: Chloe Collyer

Person seated in a crowd asking a question into a microphone.

“How can we gather now?,” March 31–April 2, 2023, produced by Washington Project for the Arts, co-directed by Asad Raza & Prem Krishnamurthy, symposium attendee Anisa Olufemi asks a question during Stefanie Hessler’s keynote lecture, photo by McKenzie Grant-Gordon courtesy of Washington Project for the Arts.

Gallery installation with people viewing art.

Installation view of Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962. Photo: David Heald. Courtesy Grey Art Museum, New York University

Stories and News

In the News

Strategic Initiatives

An American in Paris, Honored Like Nobody Before

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A group of people is seated around a long table with a screen at showing many people on a video call.

New Art School Modality module Arts Writing / Writing About Art, 2024